“Love me with thine open youth
In its frank surrender;
With the vowing of thy mouth,
With its silence tender”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If I had only had what you have had in me,
someone older, twenty years between us,
and an horizon, stretching far and wide, just at your feet.
You are the patrician who will inherit this world.
Everything fell into your lap, grace and beauty,
the awkward lack of experience that you boys have
has saved you an immortal who wants you as cup-bearer,
and you live tenderly and secure in your present.
I should have sold so many years that now I have also lost,
so as to escape that world of little boys:
theatre and opera, dinners, concerts, recitals
and the black and white of an actress who is now dead.
Nights at the discothèque have smashed illusions
like tall tumblers, sugary drinks that shatter everywhere,
and many nights, with cold sheets and burning flesh,
of long months that we now see as epochs.
This has been as never before the only mild winter
given to me to live while you,
prodigal son, are coming back home with the girls,
who were dreaming of you on nights of white sheets,
I shall continue to run away barefoot through snowstorms,
with no doorways, through jungles and deserts,
like the crazy woman, possessed, running away from a past
that pursues her with the empty stomach of a wolf.